In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,50
your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.
He sits for a long time at the table, not seeing, not hearing anything. When he feels strong enough to move he gets up very slowly and locks the house and goes out, walking into the world. His body feels old and through the dark lens on his eyes everything he knows looks strange and unfamiliar, as if he’s lost in a country he’s never visited before.
THREE
THE GUARDIAN
Even before their departure, when he goes to meet her flight from Cape Town, he knows he’s in trouble. He last saw her a month ago and she was in a bad way then, but look at her now. The first one off the plane, striding far ahead of the crowd. Her peroxide job has gone wrong, so that her hair has turned a strange yellow colour, standing out in angry spikes from her head. But more than this, something has changed inside her, which you can see from a long way off. She seems to burn with a luminous white light. Her face is knotted and anxious, bunched in on itself, and it takes her a long time to notice him. Then her expression clears, she smiles, as they embrace she is his old friend again.
He has been up in Pretoria for a few weeks, visiting his mother. But even before he left Cape Town, Anna was already losing the plot, living in fast motion, speeding along, saying and doing inappropriate things, and the knowledge that she was out of control showed in her face like a concealed pain. All of this has happened before, but it’s only a few days ago that her condition has finally acquired a name. Although it’s come from her psychiatrist in Cape Town, the diagnosis is one which Anna’s lover and I and even Anna herself all regard with suspicion. For us she remains human first and foremost, impervious to labels.
He is pretty sure about all this until he sees her. It’s obvious that something in her has come loose from its moorings and is sliding around inside. There are problems ahead, I realize, and the first moment comes before we’ve even left the ground. In the departure lounge she orders a beer, then looks at her companion in bemusement as he stares.
What. What’s the matter.
You’re not supposed to be doing that. We spoke about this yesterday, remember.
It’s just one drink.
You’re not allowed even one drink.
She has come with a small pharmacy in her bag, tranquillizers and mood-stabilizers and anti-depressants, which have to be taken in various combinations at different times, but alcohol or recreational drugs will undo the medication, and she solemnly swore to me over the telephone the day before that she wouldn’t touch them. She has given the same pledge to both her lover and her psychiatrist.
When I remind her of this promise she angrily cancels the order, but no sooner has the plane taken off than she orders a double whisky. A little drink every now and then, she says, won’t do me any harm. I’m speechless at her defiance, but the incident is rapidly subsumed in an ongoing disorder. When the food arrives she messes it over herself, then clambers over another passenger on her way to the bathroom to clean up. As the journey goes on, she becomes frantic to the point of tears because she’s not allowed to smoke a cigarette, and when they arrive in Bombay after midnight she spends the long taxi ride into town unzipping and rummaging through all the pockets of her rucksack in search of some missing item. Once they’re installed at the hotel she becomes a bit calmer, but almost immediately she leaves him in the room, locking the door behind her, and goes to the rooftop restaurant for yet another little drink.
On the last occasion that she went off the rails, years ago, she landed in a Cape Town clinic, emaciated and scarred with cigarette burns. It took months for her to recover, a process that she fetishized in her photographs, many of them pictures of herself naked, all her wounds on display. The episode is sexy in her mind, no cause for shame, and culminated in several bouts of electro-shock therapy, which she’d asked for, she later told me, as a substitute for killing herself.
It’s partly to avoid a repetition of the same scenario that he’s invited her